MERCHANTS of PATHOS: Confessional Poetry, Publicity, and Privacy in Cold-War America
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MERCHANTS OF PATHOS: Confessional Poetry, Publicity, and Privacy in Cold-War America. Tyne Daile Sumner Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts February 2013 The School of Culture and Communication The University of Melbourne ABSTRACT The relationship between confessional poetry and cold-war culture in America is structurally important to our understanding of ongoing debates over the authenticity of the textual voice in confessional verse. Exploring the work of poets Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, this thesis provides an explanation for the tendency among both readers and critics to conflate the roles of poet and persona in assessments of confessional poetry. It is argued that the confessional poets deliberately manipulated the status of truth in their work to create the illusion of a publicly legitimate, yet authentically private self. This thesis does not, however, reduce confessional verse to simply poetic artifice. Rather, in the process of conflating poet and persona, the confessional poets fashioned an unprecedentedly complex culture of postmodern poetics. This thesis divides the poetic voice of confessional poetry into three sites of poetics, detailing how each complicates the status of truth in confessional verse. The first site, the ambiguity of confessional poetics, is characterized by the still-contested definition of confessional poetry and the indeterminate nature of persona in confessional verse. By blurring the distinction between autobiographical fact and poetic fiction, confessional poetry directly participated in national tensions over privacy by questioning the status of truth in acts of apparent revelation. Additionally, by applying rhetoric characteristic of the modern age of publicity, confessional poetry repeatedly advertises itself within the poetic text, acting to further blur the distinction between poet and persona. In the second site, lyric poetry, it is argued that lyric poetry’s long-established definitional connection to music allowed confessional poetry a dynamic relation to voice and sound. It is argued that the confessional poets utilized the inherent audibility of the lyric poem—in both live readings and recorded readings—to create the illusion of an authentic authorial event. In the third site, publicity, the role of the confessional poets as public figures is explored. Situating the themes of confessional poetry inside the larger privacy crisis of the cold-war era, this thesis illustrates the ways in which confessional poetry engaged with social and political tensions between public and private in order to complicate the status of its claims to truth. Noting the broad changes in post-war American culture, combined with an appreciation of the ambiguous status of truth in confessional poetry, this thesis illuminates the important role of confessional poetry in using the relationship between confession, publicity, national security, and privacy, to challenge ideas about the authenticity of poetic voice. Fig. 1. Anne Sexton, Poster for Sanders Theater Reading, 7 March 1974 (Photo by Gwendolyn Stewart) rpt. in Anne Sexton: A Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 1992; print; iii). DECLARATION This is to certify that: i. This thesis comprises only my original work towards the MA. ii. Due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used. iii. This thesis is approximately 30 000 words in length, exclusive of figures, bibliographies, and appendices. Tyne Daile Sumner (2013) ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge here the invaluable support and theoretical direction of my supervisors, Professor Deirdre Coleman and Professor Stephanie Trigg. Deirdre and Stephanie listened with enthusiasm as I unpacked the formative concepts of this project and they thereafter helped to guide this thesis towards and into its current state. I would like to thank Stephanie for rummaging through what seemed like a never-ending pile of old cassette tapes—here in The School of Culture and Communication Library at The University of Melbourne—to locate for me a series of original poetry readings by Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. I listened to these with astonishment and was consequently moved to write about sound and its intricate connection to lyric verse. I would like to thank Deirdre for her ongoing supervisory brilliance, in particular, the many instances in which her conceptual clarity and extensive academic experience helped to transform my many obscure ruminations over confessional poetry into something useful. I would like to thank my undergraduate students, who listened intently to my teachings on the poetry of Sylvia Plath. Their questions and speculations helped to inspire my research on confessional poetry and hold me accountable to my ideas. I would also like to thank my good friend and intellectual mentor, Marion Jane Campbell, whose feedback on both my research and post-graduate career have, and always will be, immensely treasured. This thesis owes a great deal to my Mum and Dad who, although far away, have supported me unconditionally since the first moment it became obvious that I wanted to be an academic. Finally, I’d like to thank my partner, Tony. At moments when my productivity waned, I was impelled to get back on track on account of his incessant badgering: “When do I get to read it?” TABLE OF CONTENTS P REFACE ........................................................................................... I ABBREVIATIONS .................................................................................. II INTRODUCTION ................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER ONE SMILE OF ACCOMPLISHMENT: THE CONFLATION OF POET AND PERSONA ................. 17 Confessional Poetry’s Contested Definition .......................................................... 17 Truth and How to Avoid It: The Ambiguity of Confessional Poetics ............... 33 CHAPTER TWO A NIGHTINGALE’S VOCATION: CONFESSIONAL POETRY AND THE LYRIC ................... 46 The Overheard Utterance ........................................................................................ 46 The Speaker’s Sacred Fiction ................................................................................... 52 Voice for Radio & A Face to Match: Poetry’s Departure From the Page .......... 64 CHAPTER THREE HUMBOLDT’S GRAND PLAN: CONFESSIONAL POETRY’S ENGAGEMENT WITH PUBLICITY ........................................................................................................................ 86 Privacy, Confessional Poetry, and Popular Culture ............................................. 86 Confession Sells: The Art of Self-Promotion ...................................................... 106 CONCLUSION .................................................................................... 120 WORKS CITED .................................................................................. 127 PREFACE It was only on completing this thesis that its profoundly paradoxical nature became apparent to me. In the act of evoking confession, every confessional writer, and in particular the four poets with whom this study is concerned, confronts us with the limits of truth. As literary analysts, our natural reaction to this is to insist, as a means of theoretical preservation perhaps, that there never is and never can be direct access to an author. We do not actually know Anne Sexton; we never will know Robert Lowell; and we certainly don’t have access to the real Sylvia Plath. What we do have, however, is their work and it is from the written text that we are able to garner, at least partially, an idea of what the confessional poets might have been like. Thus, in the very act of analysing what these literary figures give us in writing—in their poetry and in other discourses—I have referred to them in ways that contradict my primary aim. That is, I discuss them as accessible, realistic figures. It is for this reason, both as a theoretical safeguard and as an interesting afterthought, that it is necessary to emphasize that I am never actually talking about real people. Or, to summon a term employed by Jacqueline Rose in a preamble much like this one, I am only ever referring to “textual entities.” Far from being a de- romanticisation of the tensions over biographical accuracy that plague studies of the confessional genre, my understanding that the confessional poets can never truly be known only adds to the mode’s allure. To be so close to accessing the real ‘Poet X,’ and yet so far from it, is just one of the many paradoxes that renders the study of poetics both complex and wonderfully engaging. I ABBREVIATIONS NES Sexton, Anne. No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose. Ed. Stephen E. Colburn. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1985. Print. PP Nelson, Deborah. Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Print. WWCP Middlebrook, Diane Wood. “What Was Confessional Poetry?” Columbia History of American Poetry. Ed. Jay Parini. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. 632-649. Print. AS Middlebrook, Diane Wood. Anne Sexton: A Biography. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Print. II MERCHANTS OF PATHOS: INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION Yet why not say what happened? Pray for the grace of accuracy Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination stealing like the tide across a map to his girl solid with yearning. We are poor passing facts, warned by that to give each figure in the photograph his living